For director, ‘Green Acres’ is the place to be

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WORKING WITH THE TALENT: Richard L. Bare directed 168 of 170 episodes of “Green Acres,” including this scene from the late 1960s with leading lady Eva Gabor. Bare declines to be photographed these days.

Director Richard Bare, whose Hollywood career spans seven decades, was home in Newport Beach one afternoon about a year and a half ago. Not retired, mind you, still working on one movie project or another.

The telephone rang – a stranger calling from Las Vegas.

“He says, ‘Are you the Richard Bare who was involved in making ‘Green Acres?’ ” Bare says – and in fact, he directed all 168 episodes of the classic ’60s sitcom.

“I said, ‘Well, yeah,’ ” Bare continues. “He said: ‘I’ve got an idea. How about making a new version of that?’ “

The man – Gary Bausch – kept talking and eventually flew to visit Bare at home.

He first made his name after World War II when he directed 63 short-subject films known as the “Behind the Eight Ball” series, or the Joe McDoakes comedies after their hapless lead character.

He shot westerns and B movies and moved into to television, where a job directing “Petticoat Junction” led to a deal with creator Jay Sommers to direct “Green Acres,” the ’60s sitcom with a theme song so memorable that strangers still break into song upon meeting Bare:

Green Acres is the place to be

Farm livin’ is the life for me

Land spreadin’ out so far and wide

Keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside

It was the emotional ties to that show and Sommers – and his gratitude for all that “Green Acres” provided him – that appealed to Bare when he agreed to try to make a new version of the show, he says.

“It allowed me to come down to Newport and retire if I wanted to – but I’m not about to retire.”

As proof, he whips out a typed list of his recent projects, which lists three screenplays – including one about famed Polish actress Helena Modjeska, an early settler of Orange County – and a novel. All of them written, and most importantly, sold in the last two years, he says.

But it’s “Green Acres,” he says, that’s on the front burner now. The time is right and he’s got file full of great ideas.

• • •

You will recall that “Green Acres” took place in Hooterville – Bausch, the man from Las Vegas certainly did.

“Here was his bit of genius,” Bare says. “He said the word ‘Hooterville’ got him thinking: ‘What if we imagined that this was the first restaurant that inspired Hooters?'”

So Bare wrote that into the script – Mr. Haney opens a restaurant and doesn’t know what to call it.

“At the end, the Eva Gabor character goes, ‘Hooters! Call it Hooters, dahlink!'” Bare says, acting out the Hungarian-accented star’s voice he knew so well in the ’60s.

And with that in the script, Bare and Bausch arranged a meeting with the owner of several California Hooters’ restaurants, who told them he loved the idea and would tell the folks back at corporate headquarters about it.

All that was missing was an option from Barbara Sommers that would allow Bare – through his company, Para-Scope Productions of Santa Ana – to take the project to the industry.

Earlier this month, all of his work came together: Bare drove up to Beverly Hills, sat down with Barbara Sommers, and signed a one-year option to make a new version of the show.

“I acquired the rights strictly through determination and stick-to-it-iveness,” he says. “”All of my friends say that about me – I don’t give up.”

Now, he’s got a budget – figuring a low-budget feature pilot can be shot for $1.7 million. He’s got the screenplay and a few actors already in mind to recreate the roles you know from the show and its endless reruns.

Now all he needs is a deal.

“I would expect (a studio) will put one of their producers on it, to work with me,” he says. “And I’ll say, ‘Fine, call him an executive producer.’ But I’ll be the producer. I’ll do all the work.

Peter Larsen has been the Pop Culture Reporter for the Orange County Register since 2004, finally achieving the neat trick of getting paid to report and write about the stuff he's obsessed about pretty much all his life. He regularly covers the Oscars and the Emmys, goes to Comic-Con and Coachella, reviews pop music, and conducts interviews with authors and actors, musicians and directors, a little of this and a whole lot of that. He grew up, in order, in California, Arkansas, Kentucky and Oregon. Graduated from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore. with degrees in English and Communications. Earned a master's degree at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Earned his first newspaper paycheck at the Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat, fled the Midwest for Los Angeles Daily News and finally ended up at the Orange County Register. He's taught one or two classes a semester in the journalism and mass communications department at Cal State Long Beach since 2006. Somehow managed to get a lovely lady to marry him, and with her have two daughters. And a dog named Buddy. Never forget the dog.